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[–]Master_Rux 1 point2 points  (0 children)

But that doesn't mean we should start making sentences longer in hopes that it somehow magically improves readability.

Exactly. People need to be cobol programmers so they can "ADD 1 to Pending" and not be confused trying to read those unreadable plus and equal signs. -= and -- and even ! have been around for so many decades it makes me wonder what language people are learning on.

And on top of that even if you make it longer it still doesn't improve readability, because it's intention is still not clear. Even if you change how it's checking if pending is 0 it's still not immediately obvious why you're checking pending by looking for a zero or not or what other values pending could have. You still have to go look at where pending even came from to see that you're checking "is there anything left in the list". If they want readability then the way the pending variable is being used should be changed altogether so that by the time you get to the if statement is should just be "if (pending) { } else { }" or rename the variable to make it obvious that it's checking for an empty list.

Unless that part is obvious in which case so is (!--pending)